(NewsNation) — Whistleblower David Grusch wants Americans to make UAPs an election issue, telling NewsNation that both Democrats and Republicans who oppose transparency efforts should be voted out of office.
“I just don’t appreciate people that don’t want transparency” about unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, Grusch said in an interview aired Tuesday on “Elizabeth Vargas Reports.”
In the wide-ranging interview, Grusch said he wants to be a “tool for change” and also criticized Rep. Mike Turner, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee.
“Mike Turner probably has no business being the chairman,” Grusch said.
Grusch, a former Air Force intelligence officer, made headlines earlier this year when he said the U.S. government is covering up a UAP retrieval program. The United States, Grusch said, is in possession of “quite a number” of “nonhuman exotic origin vehicles that have either landed or crashed.”
Congress has been investigating UAPs since Grusch first went public with his claims in an exclusive NewsNation interview with investigative journalist Ross Coulthart earlier this year.
Some lawmakers have since pushed for more transparency around UAPs, or UFOs as they are commonly referred to. They took a step toward that goal by including in the annual defense funding bill a provision requiring disclosure of classified records relating to UAPs but not before stripping out key portions of the measure.
NewsNation sources said the provisions were taken out after influence from the House Intelligence Committee, which Turner chairs.
Grusch said someone like Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., may be better suited to lead the panel.
“He’s a former Marine Corps intelligence officer, he takes this issues seriously, he’s spoken out about this publicly, he should be chair,” Grusch said.
Since coming forward with his claims, Grusch said his life has been a “nightmare” as he faces a barrage of criticism from skeptics and naysayers.
“I never wanted to do this, but my sense of service, I decided to do this for the right reasons, I think, to hold Congress accountable, to hold the IG accountable, hold the executive branch accountable, because we have a severe constitutional crisis right now,” Grusch said. “This is not a laughing matter. We have a severe oversight issue where there’s a caste system of individuals, previous presidents most likely were abusing their authority under the unitary executive theory, a theory that the president, the chief executive, has ultimate power and with the stroke of the pen can decide certain things.”
Responding to critics who say he doesn’t have any firsthand knowledge himself, Grusch said in an interview with NewsNation aired Monday that he has finally received clearance from the Pentagon to disclose more of what he knows, which he plans to do in an op-ed in the coming weeks.
He was disappointed about the watering down of the UAP measure in the defense bill, which he called the “greatest legislative failure in American history.”
In Tuesday’s interview, he called on people to make UAPs an election issue if Congress and the president don’t act on it themselves.
“People need to be voting out these people … that oppose this legislation and allow their constituencies to decide if these are the kinds of leaders they want that are hindering government transparency,” Grusch said. “Through a democratic process in the 2024 election, we need to get these people out of office.”